From the Magazine

The Lonely Heir: Inside the Isolating Boarding School Days of Prince Charles

Growing up, Prince Charles struggled to please his parents and to fill a role that was against his nature. In an adaptation from her new book, Sally Bedell Smith chronicles the brutal bullying the heir endured at school, and the unlikely place in which he found solace.

I. A Sensitive Boy

Before the stroke of midnight on November 14, 1948, Prince Charles
Philip Arthur George officially became public property. While his
22-year-old mother, Princess Elizabeth, rested in her bedroom suite in
Buckingham Palace, her newborn heir was brought to the vast gilded
ballroom by the royal midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Under the 46-foot-high
ceilings—juxtaposed with the monarch’s massive throne draped in
red-and-gold embroidered velvet—the infant was swaddled in white
blankets and placed in a simple cot for viewing by the royal courtiers
who served his grandfather King George VI and his grandmother Queen
Elizabeth.

“Just a plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s
private secretary. “Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being
born, he was being looked at by outsiders—but with great affection and
good will.”

Charles was hemmed in by high expectations and scrutiny from the
start—unlike his mother, who had 10 relatively carefree years of
childhood. It was only when her father unexpectedly took the throne, in
1936, on the abdication of his older brother, King Edward VIII, that
Princess Elizabeth assumed her position as next in line.

In December, four-week-old Charles was christened beneath the ornate
dome of the Music Room at Buckingham Palace. The Archbishop of
Canterbury doused the little prince with water from the river Jordan
that had been poured into the gold Lily Font, designed by Prince Albert
and used for all of his and Queen Victoria’s children. Delighted with
her firstborn, Elizabeth breast-fed him for two months, until she
contracted measles and was forced to stop. Yet she was often away from
Charles in his infancy, spending as much time as she could with her
husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, an officer in the Royal Navy,
who was posted to Malta in October 1949. She managed to celebrate her
son’s first birthday, but afterward she was abroad, and separated from
her son, for long intervals.

Prince Philip scarcely knew his son for the first two years of the boy’s
life, though on his return from overseas duty he did take the time to
teach Charles to shoot and fish, and to swim in the Buckingham Palace
pool. When Prince Charles hit bottom after his separation from Diana, in
1992, he unburdened himself about the miseries of his youth to Jonathan
Dimbleby, who was writing an authorized biography. Dimbleby noted that,
as a little boy, Charles was “easily cowed by the forceful personality
of his father,” whose rebukes for “a deficiency in behaviour or
attitude . . . easily drew tears.” While brusque, Philip was
“well-meaning but unimaginative.” Friends who spoke with Charles’s
permission described the duke’s “belittling” and even “bullying” his
son. Charles was less harsh about his mother, but his opinion had a
bitter edge. She was “not indifferent so much as detached.”

Charles and a royal corgi, Sugar, at Windsor.

From Bettmann/Getty Images; Digital colorization by Lee Ruelle.

Nearly two decades later, in 2012, Charles tried to make amends in a TV
documentary tribute to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. Home movies
depicted an idyllic childhood at the family’s country estates at
Sandringham, in Norfolk, and Balmoral, in Scotland. Footage of Prince
Philip teetering on a tricycle and zooming down a slide on the Royal
Yacht Britannia contradicted his reputation as a tetchy martinet, and
scenes of the Queen romping with her children were meant to dispel the
notion of her being distant and unaffectionate.

Charles was sensitive from the start, and his finely tuned antennae were
susceptible to slights and rebukes. During one luncheon at Broadlands,
the home of Philip’s uncle Louis Mountbatten, the guests were served
wild strawberries. Charles, aged eight, methodically began removing the
stems from the berries on his plate. “Don’t take the little stems
out,” Edwina Mountbatten said. “Look, you can pick them up by the
stems and dip them in sugar.” Moments later, his cousin Pamela Hicks
noticed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on.
That was so sad, and so typical of how sensitive he was.”

As Philip watched these traits emerging, he worried that Charles could
become weak and vulnerable, so he set about toughening him up. Asked in
an interview when he was 20 years old whether his father had been a
“tough disciplinarian” and whether he had been told “to sit down and
shut up,” Charles answered without hesitation: “The whole time, yes.”

More often than not, the duke was a blunt instrument, unable to resist
personal remarks. He was sarcastic with his daughter, Anne, as well. But
Charles’s younger sister, a confident extrovert, could push back, while
the young prince wilted, retreating farther into his shell.

When Elizabeth became Queen, her dedication to her duties meant even less time for her children. She relied increasingly on her husband to
make the major family decisions. Neither parent was physically
demonstrative. That lack of tactile connection was achingly apparent in
May 1954, when the Queen and Prince Philip greeted five-year-old Charles
and three-year-old Anne with handshakes after an absence of nearly six
months on a tour of Commonwealth nations. Martin Charteris, Elizabeth’s
onetime private secretary, observed that Charles “must have been
baffled by what a natural mother-son relationship was meant to be
like.”

Charles was indulged by his maternal grandmother, the Queen Mother, and
visited her frequently at Royal Lodge, her pale-pink home in Windsor
Great Park, when his parents were away. As early as age two, he would
sit on her bed playing with her lipsticks, rattling the tops, marveling
at the colors. When he was five, she let him explore Shaw Farm, in the
Windsor Home Park. She also opened up a world of music and art that
Charles felt his parents didn’t adequately appreciate. “My grandmother
was the person who taught me to look at things,” he recalled.

As heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for school-mates,
who ridiculed his protruding ears.

She never hesitated to give her grandson the hugs he craved. She
encouraged his kind and gentle nature—the eagerness to share his candy
with other children, and, when choosing sides for games, to select the
weakest first for his team. “Her protective side clocked in on his
behalf,” said her longtime lady-in-waiting, Dame Frances
Campbell-Preston. At the same time, with the best intentions, she fueled
the young prince’s tendency to self-pity, which fed one of his strongest
traits, known as “whinging”—the more pointed British word for
whining.

II. “Out for a Duck”

Charles’s early home-schooling was supervised by Catherine Peebles, his
sensible Glaswegian governess, nicknamed “Mispy,” who felt compassion
for his insecurities and his tendency to “draw back” at the hint of a
raised voice. Eager to please, he plodded diligently through his lessons
but was easily distracted and dreamy. “He is young to think so much,”
Winston Churchill remarked after observing Charles shortly before his
fourth birthday.

One book that caught the prince’s eye and helped hone his sense of humor
was Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, a volume of poetry about the
consequences of bad behavior. It brimmed with quirkiness and bizarre
characters—a precursor to the sketches by the Goons and Monty Python
comedy troupes, two happily subversive influences in his life. But by
the time he was eight, the Queen and Prince Philip had decided that he
needed the company of children in a classroom, making him the first heir
to the throne to be educated outside the palace.

On a walk with school-mates and a schoolmistress, London, 1957.

From Bettmann/Getty Images.

Early in 1957, he arrived in a royal limousine at Hill House School, in
Knightsbridge, London. For all his parents’ efforts to put Charles in a
normal environment—taking the bus to the playing fields and sweeping
the classroom floors—he had difficulty mixing with the other boys. A
newsreel of the school’s “field day” of sports competitions that
spring showed a solemn prince introducing his parents to his classmates,
who obediently bowed.

Charles had ability in reading and writing, although he struggled with
mathematics. His first-term report noted that “he simply loves drawing
and painting” and showed musical aptitude as well. But after a mere six
months, his father transferred him to Cheam School, in Hampshire, where
Philip himself had been sent at the age of eight. Although it was
founded in 1645, the school had a progressive tilt, avoiding the
exclusive atmosphere of other preparatory boarding schools.

Charles was just shy of his ninth birthday but considerably more
vulnerable than his father. He suffered from acute homesickness,
clutching his teddy bear and weeping frequently in private. “I’ve
always preferred my own company or just a one to one,” he has said. As
heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for school-mates, who
ridiculed his protruding ears and called the pudgy prince “fatty.” He
fell into a routine that included weekly letters home—the beginning of
his passion for written correspondence. In the tradition of the time, he
braved beatings from two different headmasters for flouting the rules.
“I am one of those for whom corporal punishment actually worked,” he
grimly recalled.

Charles lacked his father’s resilient temperament, and he lacked the
physical prowess to command respect.

Charles had a fragile constitution. He suffered from chronic sinus
infections and was hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in May 1957. Later
that year, when he was bed-ridden at school with Asian flu, his parents
didn’t visit him. (Both had been inoculated, so there was no fear of
contagion.) Instead, before leaving for a royal tour of Canada, in
October, the Queen sent him a farewell letter. The Queen and Prince
Philip were again on tour, in India, when Charles came down with
measles, at age 12.

Physically uncoordinated and slow as well as overweight, Charles had no
talent for Rugby, cricket, or soccer—the prestige schoolboy sports.
During vacations he joined local boys who lived near Balmoral for
cricket matches. “I would invariably walk boldly out to the crease,”
he recalled, “only to return, ignominiously, a few minutes later when I
was out for a duck”—that is, having failed to score any runs.
Elizabeth had taught Charles to ride, starting at age four. He was
timorous on horseback, while his sister, Anne, was bold. Mostly he
feared jumping. Anne’s equine prowess pleased her mother, and Philip saw
a kindred spirit in her confidence and fearlessness.

Charles’s loneliness and unhappiness at Cheam were painfully obvious to
his family. In a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Eden at the beginning
of 1958, the Queen wrote, “Charles is just beginning to dread the
return to school next week—so much worse for the second term.” She
knew that Cheam was “a misery” to her son, according to a biography of
Charles by Dermot Morrah, which was sanctioned by the royal family.
Morrah observed that the Queen thought her son was “a slow developer.”

Asked as he was approaching his 21st birthday to describe the moment he
first realized as a little boy that he was heir to the throne, Charles
replied, “I think it’s something that dawns on you with the most
ghastly inexorable sense . . . and slowly you get the idea that you
have a certain duty and responsibility.” He did, however, experience an
unanticipated jolt in the summer of 1958 while watching the closing
ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, Wales, on television with
some school-mates in the headmaster’s study at Cheam. Suddenly he heard
his mother declare in a recorded speech that she was naming him the
Prince of Wales—a mortifying moment for a shy nine-year-old boy who
wanted desperately to be seen as normal and already carried the burden
of his six other titles. Even as a very young boy, he was marked out as
different.

The most important experience at Cheam was Charles’s discovery that he
felt at home on a stage—a helpful skill for a public figure. For his
role in a play about King Richard III, called The Last Baron, he spent
hours listening to a recording of Laurence Olivier in a production of
Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was November 1961, and once again his
parents were abroad, this time in Ghana. In their place, the Queen
Mother and Princess Anne watched the heir to the throne perform as
Richard, the 15th-century monarch famous for his deformity.

“After a few minutes on to the stage shambled a most horrible looking
creature,” the Queen Mother wrote to her daughter, “a leering
vulgarian, with a dreadful expression on his twisted mouth; & to my
horror I began to realize that this was my dear grandson!” She added
that “he acted his part very well” and that “in fact he made the part
quite revolting!”

Charles formed no lasting friendships during his five years at Cheam.
The Queen Mother made a strong pitch to his parents for him to continue
his education at Eton College, the ancient boarding school near Windsor
Castle. She knew that Philip had been pushing for his own alma mater,
Gordonstoun, located in an isolated part of northeastern Scotland. In a
letter to the Queen in May 1961, the Queen Mother described Eton as
“ideal . . . for one of his character & temperament.” If he went
to Gordonstoun, “he might as well be at school abroad.” She pointed
out, quite reasonably, that the children of the Queen’s friends were at
Eton.

But Philip doubled down on the value of a rough-and-tumble education,
arguing that Gordonstoun would be the best place for his timorous son.
The Queen sided with Philip, sealing Charles’s fate.

III. The Prison of Privilege

The Queen did not accompany her husband in May 1962, when he delivered
Charles to Gordonstoun. A certified pilot, Philip flew Charles to a
Royal Air Force base in Scotland and drove him the rest of the way. With
a 17th-century gray stone building at its center (built in a circular
design, according to legend, by Sir Robert Gordon so that no devils
could fly into corners), the campus had an undistinguished collection of
seven pre-fabricated wooden residences that had previously been used as
R.A.F. barracks. The prince was assigned to Windmill Lodge with 13 other
boys, the start of an ordeal that he viewed as nothing less than a
“prison sentence.”

The school’s founder, Kurt Hahn, was a progressive educator who had been
a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and ran a school in southern Germany called
Salem. Hahn, who was Jewish, fled to Britain after Hitler came to power.
He established Gordonstoun in 1934, with Prince Philip among the first
students. The school’s motto: “There is more in you.”

Hahn sought to develop character along with intellect. He promoted
Plato’s idealistic vision in The Republic of a world where
“philosophers become kings . . . , or till those we now call kings
and rulers truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy
thus come into the same hands.” Contemplating his future reign, Charles
would identify with the philosopher king, a notion later encouraged by
well-meaning advisers who championed the idea of an “activist” monarch
who would impose his wide-ranging worldview on his subjects.

Physical challenges at Gordonstoun were at the heart of building
character. The testing began with the boys’ attire (short trousers
throughout the year) and the living conditions (open windows at all
times in the grim dormitories). The day began with a run before
breakfast, followed by a frigid shower. “It was a memorable experience,
especially during the winter,” recalled Somerset Waters, a school-mate
of Charles’s. The prince nevertheless became so accustomed to the
morning ritual that as an adult he continued to take a cold shower each
day, in addition to the hot bath drawn by his valet.

Hahn aimed to create an egalitarian society where “the sons of the
powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege,” an ethos
that suited Philip when he was there. His assertive personality and
Teutonic sensibility helped him adjust to the school’s demands. He was
also a natural athlete who served as captain of both the cricket and
hockey teams. Charles had neither his father’s resilient temperament nor
his relative anonymity, and he lacked the physical prowess to command
respect. Encumbered by his titles and his status as heir to the throne,
he was singled out as a victim from his first day. “Bullying was
virtually institutionalized and very rough,” said John Stonborough, a
classmate of Charles’s.

BODYGUARD
In 1963, tabloids picked up the “cherry brandy” incident; Charles was devastated when his friend and mentor, Donald Green (in circle, left), was fired.

From John Frost Newspapers.

The housemaster at Charles’s dorm was Robert Whitby, “a truly nasty
piece of work,” recalled Stonborough. “He was vicious, a classic
bully, a weak man. If he didn’t like you, he took it out on you. He was
wrong for Charles.” Whitby, like the other housemasters, handed over
the running of the houses to senior boys, who imposed a form of martial
law, with ritualized psychological and physical abuse that included
tying boys up in laundry baskets under a cold shower. Few students would
walk with Charles to meals or class. Those boys who tried to befriend
the prince were derided with “slurping” noises. Many years later
Charles complained, with evident anguish, that since his schooldays
people were always “moving away from me, because they don’t want to be
seen as sucking up.”

As at Cheam, he was taunted for his jug ears, which his great-uncle Earl
Mountbatten unavailingly urged his parents to have surgically pinned
back. During intra-house Rugby matches, teammates and opponents alike
pummeled Charles in the scrum. “I never saw him react at all,”
recalled Stonborough. “He was very stoic. He never fought back.” At
night in the dormitory, the bullies tormented Charles, who detailed the
abuse in anguished letters to friends and relatives.

Charles found one escape at the nearby home of Captain Iain Tennant and
his wife, Lady Margaret. She was the sister of a childhood friend of the
Queen’s, David Airlie (the 13th earl). Tennant was chairman of
Gordonstoun, so he could extend the privilege of weekend visits, when
Charles would “cry his eyes out,” said Sir Malcolm Ross, who served as
one of the Queen’s longtime senior advisers. “Iain and Margy really
saved him from complete misery,” said David Airlie’s wife, Virginia.

A crucial day-to-day support for Charles was Donald Green, the royal
bodyguard who, in time, became a father figure. Green stood six feet
five, dressed well, drove a Land Rover, and seemed “slightly James
Bond-ish” to the other boys. Green was Charles’s one constant friend,
although there was little he could do about the abuse that occurred
within the dormitories. This friendship, more readily made than with
Charles’s peers, set the prince’s lifelong pattern of seeking company
with his elders.

In June 1963, during Charles’s second year, he was sailing on the school
ketch, the Pinta, to the Isle of Lewis. The boys were taken to a pub in
the village at Stornoway Harbor, where the 14-year-old prince ordered a
cherry brandy. “I said the first drink that came into my head,” he
recalled, “because I’d drunk it before, when it was cold, out
shooting.” Unbeknownst to Charles, a tabloid reporter was present, and
his foray into under-age drinking became banner headlines in the
tabloids as “the whole world exploded around my ears.” Afterward, the
Metropolitan Police fired Don Green, robbing Charles of an ally and
confidant. Charles was devastated, saying later that “I have never been
able to forgive them for doing that. . . . I thought it was the end of
the world.”

Charles had middling success in his coursework—with the exception of
his declamatory ability—but he found a creative refuge in the art room
presided over by a kind and somewhat effete master in his 20s named
Robert Waddell. The prince gravitated toward pottery rather than
painting—“like an idiot,” he later said. Classical music served as a
balm as well. His grandmother had taken him to see a concert by cellist
Jacqueline du Pré, inspiring him to take up the instrument at age 14.
“It had such a rich deep sound,” he recalled. “I’d never heard sounds
like it.”

Gordonstoun nearly extinguished Charles’s budding interest in
Shakespeare, as he and his classmates “ground our way” through Julius
Caesar for standardized tests. The Bard came alive only after the
arrival in 1964 of a new English master, Eric Anderson—like the art
teacher Waddell, also in his 20s—who encouraged Charles to act in
several of Shakespeare’s dramas. In November 1965 he played the lead in
Macbeth. His interpretation, said Anderson, evoked “a sensitive soul
who is behaving in a way that is really uncharacteristic of him because
of other forces.” Charles was excited about the prospect of his
parents’ coming to see a performance. But as he “lay there and thrashed
about” onstage, he wrote in a letter, “all I could hear was my father
and ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ ” Afterward, he asked Prince Philip, “Why did you
laugh?” “It sounds like the Goons,” said his father—a dagger to the
heart of a young man so eager to please.

He similarly disappointed Philip in team sports, although he did develop
considerable skill in the more solitary pursuit of fishing, along with
traditional upper-crust shooting. At 13, Charles shot his first stag,
steeling himself to the sight of the beast being eviscerated by servants
on the hillside at Balmoral.

In 1961, he took up polo, eager to follow his father. “I was all for
it,” said Charles. “At least you stay on the ground”—as opposed to
jumping over fences in fox-hunting. By 1964, Charles was applying
himself to the sport more seriously. That year, he also started playing
practice matches with Philip at the Household Brigade Polo Club, on
Smith’s Lawn, at Windsor Great Park. Still a censorious figure, Philip
nevertheless was idolized by Charles. The young prince began to mimic
his mannerisms—walking with one arm behind his back, gesturing with
his right forefinger, clasping his hands for emphasis, and pushing up
the sleeve of his left arm.

IV. “Pommie Bastard”

With renewed determination to give his son backbone, Philip made the
unusual decision to send him to Australia at age 17 for two terms in the
outback at Timbertop, the wilderness branch of the Geelong Church of
England Grammar School, in Melbourne. Other than a trip on the Britannia
to Libya, at age five, it was Charles’s first time leaving Europe.

Philip assigned David Checketts, his equerry—an aide-de-camp entrusted
with logistics—to supervise his son’s stay Down Under. Unlike other
royal advisers, the 36-year-old Checketts was decidedly middle-class.
The product of a state-run grammar school, he had served in the Royal
Air Force. His down-to-earth manner put the uncertain prince at ease.

Charles and Checketts arrived in Australia in early February 1966. They
were greeted by a daunting contingent of more than 300 reporters and
photographers that the prince endured with gritted teeth. At Timbertop
he shared a bedroom and sitting room with a handpicked roommate,
Geelong’s head boy.

The prince was liberated by the informality of a country where, as he
quickly discerned, “there is no such thing as aristocracy or anything
like it.” For the first time, he was judged on “how people see you,
and feel about you.” Students and masters treated him as one of them,
and to his surprise he felt little homesickness. He was mildly teased as
a “Pommie,” Australian slang for Englishman, but faced none of the
sadistic hazing endemic at Gordonstoun.

The boys did only a modicum of studying. Timbertop was all about
physical challenges, which Charles now embraced with surprising success.
He undertook cross-country expeditions in blistering heat, logging as
many as 70 miles in three days—climbing five peaks along the way—and
spending nights freezing in a sleeping bag. He proudly relayed his
accomplishments in his letters home.

He encountered leeches, snakes, bull ants, and funnel-web spiders, and
joined the other students in chopping and splitting wood, feeding pigs,
picking up litter, and cleaning out fly traps—“revolting glass bowls
seething with flies and very ancient meat.” It was a more physically
testing experience than Gordonstoun, “but it was jolly good for the
character and, in many ways, I loved it and learnt a lot from it.” On
his own terms, in the right circumstances, he showed his toughness and
proved to his father that he was not, in fact, a weakling.

On weekends he relished ordinary life with David Checketts’s family at
the farm they rented near the small town of Lillydale. He indulged his
passion for fishing, helped David’s wife, Leila, in the kitchen, played
with their three children, and watched television in his pajamas. In
completely relaxed surroundings he perfected his talent for mimicry by
performing routines from his favorite characters on The Goon Show, which
to his “profound regret” had ended its run on the radio in 1960. One
of his best efforts was Peter Sellers’s falsetto “Bluebottle.”

Charles reveled in the sheer Goons silliness. (Seagoon: “Wait! I’ve got
a hunch!” Grytpype-Thynne: “It suits you!”) Later in life he would
rely on a sense of absurdity as an antidote to his oppressive
surroundings. Goons humor, typically British, was all about breaking the
rules, which carried an extra frisson of pleasure for the heir to the
throne.

Charles enjoyed his six months in Australia “mainly because it was such
a contrast to everything he couldn’t stand about Gordonstoun,” said one
of his advisers, recalling the bullying that had so tormented him. He
also showed his mettle during some 50 official engagements—his first
exposure to crowds on his own. “I took the plunge and went over and
talked to people,” he recalled. “That suddenly unlocked a completely
different feeling, and I was then able to communicate and talk to people
so much more.” The Australians, in turn, discovered “a friendly,
intelligent, natural boy with a good sense of humor,” said Thomas
Garnett, the headmaster of Timbertop, “someone who by no means has an
easy task ahead of him in life.” When he left, in July 1966, his mates
gave him a rousing “three cheers for Prince Charles—a real Pommie
bastard!”

Greeting admirers at Bondi Beach, Australia, 1966.

From Central Press/Getty Images.

V. Square Peg, Round Hole

After an extended summertime stay at Balmoral, Charles returned to
Gordonstoun in the autumn of 1966 for his final year. Headmaster Robert
Chew named him head boy, known by the Platonic term “Guardian.” Among
the prince’s privileges as Guardian was his own bedroom in the apartment
assigned to Robert Waddell, “the quiet alter ego of Gordonstoun,” in
the view of Charles’s cousin and godson Timothy Knatchbull, who later
attended the school. “With his tittle-tattle and his mini-snobbery
. . . [Waddell] had the sort of mind of a Victorian matron. He
was a wonderful other pole of Gordonstoun, away from the sort of
knobby-kneed brigade.” Charles’s only lasting friendships from his five
years on the shores of the Moray Firth were with his older masters,
Anderson and Waddell.

After he left with his parents for Balmoral at the end of July 1967,
Charles obediently said that Gordonstoun had taught him self-control and
self-discipline, and had given “shape and form and tidiness” to his
life, although in fact he was personally disorganized. Always a correct,
dutiful, and seemingly mature figure in the public eye, Charles
nevertheless remained socially awkward and emotionally immature, even as
he appeared old before his time. Surprisingly, his parents acknowledged
to authorized royal biographer Dermot Morrah that the Gordonstoun
experiment had fallen short of their hopes, and that Charles was “a
square peg in a round hole.” Morrah wrote in To Be a King, his 1968
book about Charles’s early life, that the school had driven the prince
only “further in upon himself.” Well into his 60s, Charles continued
to complain about the unhappiness he had felt at Gordonstoun. And as his
cousin Pamela Hicks observed, “he can never leave anything behind
him.”